by Mark Parragh
“John! Thanks for coming,” said Josh. “What do you think? Is this place great or what? Wait until you see the view from the terrace. Did you eat?”
“I’m fine,” said Crane. “Did you buy an island?”
They walked back up the dock toward an arc of beach stretched between two white cliffs.
“Rented it,” said Josh. “It’s not for sale. Can you imagine? I mean it’s probably a bad idea. I’d just disappear here and then nothing would get done. Anyway, I appreciate you going out of your way.”
Crane looked around. “Yeah, this is a real hardship, Josh.”
“Well, I’m not done imposing on you,” Josh answered. So, there was a job. Crane had expected as much.
Josh led him up a staircase carved into one of the cliffs. The terrace had a sweeping arc of glass and sliding doors on one side, and a spectacular view of the sea on the other. Josh led the way to a small table with two glasses, a pitcher of ice, and a bottle of ouzo. He prepared the drinks and they drank in silence, listening to the sounds of the ocean, watching sea birds wheel and dive for fish.
“So where are you sending me?” Crane asked at last.
“We’ve got a problem in Iceland,” said Josh.
“What kind of problem?”
“A company called Gögnfoss Greinandi, hlutafélag,” Josh said, and Crane was surprised at how easily his tongue rolled around the complex, Nordic syllables. “Datafall Analytics in English. They do some public facing stuff. Social media, massively multi-player gaming. Less publicly, they do data mining, consumer profiling, and some less savory things. They’re responsible for 21 percent of all Internet traffic into Iceland. And apparently, they’re up to something. A few months ago, I was contacted by an employee at their supercomputing center outside Reykjavik. They were working on strong crypto, and he was worried about what they meant to do with it.”
Crane sipped his ouzo. A gull cried overhead. “So why did he come to you?”
“They’re building on my work,” Josh said. “Predicting large dataset fluctuations. He’d figured I’d understand. If they pull this off, they’ll have the keys to everything. Every government secret, every banking password, right down to my aunt’s Facebook page.”
“I gather they can’t be trusted with it,” said Crane. “I’ll take a little more of that, by the way.”
Josh poured him another glass. “We gotta watch ourselves with this stuff.”
They clinked their glasses and drank.
“And nobody can be trusted with that,” Josh added. “Not even me. I wanted to see how close they are, so I had my people work up something to tap their data. That part was really cool. They’ve got 150 racks of blade servers, over 10,000 nodes, something like 200,000 cores altogether. We figured out how to holographically image just one of them over very short intervals to capture the state of the whole system.”
Crane had no idea what Josh was talking about, but he gathered it was meant to be impressive. “Really?” he said, leaning in.
If Josh noticed the sarcasm, he didn’t acknowledge it. “I haven’t been sitting on my ass since I cracked the stock market. If these guys are using my work, I’ve got a couple years on them.”
“So all’s well?”
“No,” said Josh. “We wanted to bug their system and watch it in real time. But their network security’s pinpoint. We couldn’t slip a bit through without them noticing it. So we did the next best thing. We made a recorder and sent it over to Iceland. Our contact planted it in one of the servers. Plan was, he’d leave it there for a couple months, then pull it and send it back to us.”
“I take it something went wrong.”
“Datafall got suspicious. They fired him, walked him out of the building, and that was that. Apparently, they didn’t know about the tap. As far as we know, it’s still there. But I need you to go in and get it, and sneakernet the data back here.”
Crane considered the implications, assembled his questions into some kind of orderly list.
“What do we know about the place? The physical layout? Security?”
“I’ve got a file for you,” said Josh. “We know the basics. Plan of the building, data and power trunks, things like that. We know their security’s very good. That’s why I have you.”
“Flattery won’t get me into the heart of a secure supercomputing center, Josh.”
“No, but it gives you a warm feeling and makes you want to do things for me.” Josh grinned, then waved the issue away. “You can get in. We’ll make sure you have what you need.”
“What about the device itself? What’s it look like? Where’s it hidden?”
“Got you some backup for that,” said Josh. He tapped his smart watch and spoke into it. “Can you join us on the terrace, please?”
A few moments later, a set of doors slid open and a young black man emerged. He might have been Josh’s age, though Crane wouldn’t have bet on it. He was a little overdressed for the beach in oxfords, black slacks, and a white shirt open at the collar. He approached rather tentatively, Crane thought, the way you might approach a movie star for an autograph on the street.
They stood and Josh made the introductions. “John, meet Georges Benly Akema. Georges, this is John Crane.”
They shook hands and Crane said, “Nice to meet you.”
“I’ve done some of your tech support work, Mr. Crane,” said Georges, and Crane heard a lilting African accent in his crisply enunciated English. “It’s a pleasure to meet you face-to-face at last.”
“Georges was studying electrical engineering in Cameroon. He actually built a smaller version of my prototype system out of cast-off parts as a school project! But his family got caught up in something over there, and they had to leave the country. When I found him, he was busing tables in an Indian restaurant in Palo Alto. Total waste of talent. He’ll be your tech support. He knows his way around the hardware, and he has the specs on the data tap. He’ll fly into Reykjavik with you, and you’ll wear a pair of stereo cameras so he can see what you see. If you have any trouble with the technical setup, he can walk you through it.”
Crane glanced over at Georges. “You’re comfortable with this?”
“Yes, Mr. Crane,” said Georges. He drew up to his full height and tried to look confident. “This is an important job. I look forward to contributing to the success of the mission.”
Crane grinned. “Well, you can dial it back a little,” he said. “And call me John.”
Chapter 9
Inside the Datafall building, Crane looked down a darkened hallway lined with closed doors, a bulletin board, and a fire extinguisher. Somewhere, a radio played jangly Europop. Nothing moved. He slipped in his earpiece and put on the glasses they’d given him with its tiny cameras at his temples.
“Georges, you there?”
Georges was aboard Josh’s Gulfstream at Keflavik Airport, with the pilots in the cockpit and the engines warm. Crane had told them to be ready to leave on very short notice.
“Coming in now,” Georges said in his ear. “I’ve got your position. The maintenance shaft is about thirty meters up.”
Crane moved quickly down the hallway. His keycard could get him through most of the doors. But the plan was to avoid the hallways entirely. In a niche behind the elevators, he found an access panel that opened onto a maintenance crawlspace. Crane slipped inside, closed the panel behind him, and was plunged into darkness. He switched on the flashlight mounted on his shoulder and saw a cement shaft with steel rungs for climbing. He started down.
At the bottom, another panel opened into a narrow tunnel. He followed it until it ended at a door. The supercomputer chamber would be on the other side. Crane switched off his light and crouched in the blackness, listening. When he heard nothing after thirty seconds, he slid the panel open and stepped through.
“Whoa,” Georges said in his ear.
The chamber appeared to be carved out of sandstone, hung with panels of deep burgundy fabric. The stone facade was layered
into tiers of false columns and arches that held recessed lights. With the coolness, the dim light, the quiet, the place suggested a medieval basilica.
Suspended in the center of the chamber was a huge metal and plexiglass cube. Inside, server racks stood in orderly rows. They were strung with color coded bundles of cable and glittered with LEDs. In their setting, the racks made Crane think of gravestones.
Crane was at the bottom of the chamber, a sub-floor strung with thick bundles of power cables and hoses for cooling water. Directly above him, a metal mesh deck ran around the outer edge of the chamber, and a narrow bridge crossed to the cube of the supercomputer itself.
Crane heard a door opening, then footsteps echoed on the metal deck. He edged back into the shadows. A few moments later, a guard walked past above him. His black battle dress uniform and MP-5 submachine gun effectively shattered the ecclesiastical feel of the place. He walked around the cube and left by the doors on the opposite side.
When the doors had closed, Crane moved quickly up a metal staircase to the deck. The bridge led to a revolving door of plexiglass panes. Crane passed through it. Inside, he heard the quiet whisper of cooling fans. He scanned the server racks, letting Georges read the code numbers as he moved down the rows.
“We want node 1186, rack 29,” said Georges. “Next left.”
Crane turned the corner. He spotted rack 29, crouched beside it, and pressed the release button. The rack hissed softly open on pneumatic runners to reveal rows of processors and memory modules. Crane moved aside a thick, orange bundle of cable and scanned the board.
“Where is it?” said Georges, echoing Crane’s thought.
Crane had seen photos of the data tap. It was a little smaller than a cigarette pack, built to look like another processor so it would be easy to overlook. But Crane knew what to look for; it just wasn’t there.
“Check the board ID,” said Georges.
“Where is that?”
“Look left.”
Crane did and saw a small code number etched into the board. He heard typing, then, “That’s not the right board. That should be in rack 41. Check the next drawer up.”
Crane moved up a drawer, pressed the release, and the rack hissed out. He looked at the code number.
“That’s wrong too. They must be rotating the nodes! Try…hang on.”
Crane heard more typing. He was intimately aware of passing time. At any moment the man he’d attacked could come to or be missed. Someone might come into the chamber, or he might trigger some hardware alarm. Crane’s instincts told him to get out, but he wasn’t leaving without the data tap.
Georges had him move down the row he was on, checking board numbers and looking for a pattern. Finally, he said, “Okay, got it.”
Georges sent Crane down two more aisles to another cabinet. “Same thing. Sixth drawer up.”
Crane pressed the button, and the rack slid out. He pushed aside the bundle of cable and there it was. An extra processor module with a heat sink glued on with thermal paste.
“Bingo,” said Georges. “Pull the heat sink and…”
Crane removed the heat sink, but Georges’ voice was fading in and out behind harsh static.
“Georges?”
“…getting this, Crane?”
“You’re fading.”
“Interference,” Georges said as the static rose. “Someone’s jam…”
Then Georges was gone.
Crane swore. They’d been discovered somehow. Before long, armed guards would storm the chamber.
There was a procedure for disconnecting the data tap, but Georges was supposed to walk him through it, and Crane had no more time to be delicate. He popped the clips holding the board in place and ripped the whole thing free. He positioned it carefully against the edge of the rack and pushed hard until he broke off the corner of the circuit board that held the data tap. He slipped it into a zippered pocket on his pants.
Outside, the lights came up. He noticed a red LED blinking on the frame of the revolving door. It was probably locked down now to trap him inside.
He ran through the rows of cabinets, pressing release buttons at random. Racks slid out into the aisles, making it harder to follow him. Finally, Crane stepped up onto one extended rack near the center of the cube, and pulled himself on top of the cabinet.
A trio of security guards appeared outside, armed with MP-5s. One moved to the revolving door, and the red light went out long enough for him to enter. The other two circled the supercomputer, then took up positions covering the doors leading out of the chamber.
The guard inside the cube moved slowly down the center aisle, sweeping each row with his weapon as he came. He spotted the disturbed processor racks and called that in. He turned down an aisle, checking racks, but didn’t close them. Finally, he turned down Crane’s aisle. Crane lay flat atop the cabinet, holding his breath, willing the guard to focus on the opened processor nodes instead of looking up. As the man stepped around the rack Crane had used to climb up, Crane pushed off the cabinet and dove onto him.
The impact drove the guard into the rack and knocked the breath out of him. The rack tore loose, and they fell. Cooling water from a broken hose sprayed over them as they struggled.
Crane heard shouting as he slammed the guard’s right arm hard against a cabinet. His gun fell to the floor, and Crane knocked the man out.
There were more voices outside now. They’d be calling for the revolving door to be released. They could already cover the central aisle. In the other direction was a gauntlet of servers and the plexiglass wall of the cube. Crane’s way out was decided for him. He’d wanted to travel light, so he hadn’t prepared for too many contingencies, but he had the basics.
He hurriedly sifted through his pack and took out the compact Sig Sauer P938 pistol he preferred when he wasn’t planning to need a gun. From the few other odds and ends, he chose a smoke grenade and a clear plastic tube that held two foil pouches the size of Crane’s fist. He removed one and returned the tube to his pack.
The pistol went into a custom thigh holster built into his pants leg. The smoke grenade clipped to his belt. That left the foil pouch. Crane tore it open. Inside was a doughy, white mass the size of a tennis ball that started to hiss on contact with the air. Crane hurled it down the aisle, and it splattered against the plexiglass.
Crane picked up the guard’s MP-5, took a deep breath, and counted to three. The panel was already turning milky white, and Crane could hear faint cracking sounds. He leapt to his feet and sprinted down the aisle, firing the MP-5 into the plexiglass. He hit it hard and exploded through the panel in a shower of bright fragments. He cleared the gap and landed on the metal deck with a jarring impact.
One of the guards was already through the revolving door and inside the cube, but the other ran toward him. Crane emptied the rest of the clip at him, and he fell back around the corner. Crane tossed the smoke grenade after him.
He could hear alarms as he stood up and discarded the empty submachine gun. He didn’t know where to go. If they’d figured out how he got in, they could have sealed the access shaft.
“Georges?”
There was no response. Crane could taste the chemical tang of his smoke filling the chamber. Whatever he did, he needed to decide now.
Then he heard footsteps and whirled as a figure hurtled at him. He wore a jumpsuit and brandished some kind of long, metal tool. Not a guard, but a technician from somewhere.
Crane drew his pistol, but couldn’t bring it to bear before the rod smashed across his wrist and the tech slammed into him. His pistol clattered away across the deck, and their momentum carried them both over the edge.
They hit the cement floor below. The tech lay stunned, the tool on the floor beside him. Crane grabbed it and slammed him in the temple as he tried to rise. The tech went still.
Crane heard shouting above. His gun was out of reach, and he’d lost situational awareness. It was time to leave. Crane ducked beneath the deck and ran.
They finally found Einar Persson at Harpa, the glass honeycomb concert hall perched on Reykjavik’s waterfront. He was enjoying a performance of the Iceland Symphony in the company of a very beautiful woman when they set a helicopter down directly in front of the main entrance.
For a moment, Einar indulged himself by pretending the clatter outside had nothing to do with him. He imagined some police emergency that he could gawk at from behind the crime scene tape like everyone else. But he knew better. Then two members of Datafall’s security team burst into the hall in tactical uniforms and boots, with unhappy ushers in tow.
Einar leant over to his date and whispered, “I’m terribly sorry for this. Really, I am. I’ll call you as soon as I’m able.”
Then, over her murmured protestations, he stood up and made his way to the end of the row. The orchestra soldiered on through Debussy’s La Mer, and annoyed patrons stared daggers at him as he walked up the aisle to meet the two worried looking men in their battle dress uniforms. Einar was a tall man in a tuxedo with a body builder’s physique and a blond buzz cut. He accepted the angry stares and whispered reproaches, but he didn’t acknowledge them.
“What’s happened?” he asked quietly as they walked out of the concert hall, but he knew what the answer would be. What it could only be.
“There’s been a brushfire level event, sir,” one of them answered.
Of course there had been. Nothing else would justify this kind of response. Critical company data had been compromised. One or more of Datafall’s metaphorical cats was out of its bag. Einar also knew which one it would be.
“Details.”
They filled him in as they strode quickly through the main lobby toward the doors. Building security was gathering now, and an older man in a suit followed along behind, protesting how inappropriate this all was. Einar ignored him and took in the facts as they were known. One man had penetrated the supercomputer facility and escaped. He was believed to have removed a foreign device from one of the processor nodes. He’d been in communication with someone outside the facility using a sophisticated spread spectrum system. Two men were injured and there had been minor damage to the supercomputer itself. All this had happened nearly two hours earlier. The men were very apologetic. It had taken them that long to track Einar down.